phishing scam

With the Olympics right around the corner, the last thing that you want to think about is security. Well, let me rephrase that, there is plenty of security at the Olympics itself and I’m one of many who sincerely hopes that the 2012 Olympics in London goes smoothly and safely. Go Team USA! But, if you are traveling or thinking about doing anything eCommerce-related, specifically regarding the Olympics, you need to be sure to follow this handyman’s adage, specifically “measure twice and cut once” but in this case, it’s “verify twice and order once.”

If you have already booked your travel, hotel and all related items and you have physical confirmation that all of the items that you have purchased are in order, you probably are ok. What is more concerning is the fact that many new sites are suddenly popping up on the internet related to the 2012 Olympics…and what’s worse is quite a number of these sites are fraudulent and trying to capture your personal information including financial items. And the ways that these fraudulent sites are going after you and your confidential information are getting more sophisticated each day.

As part of the year-long program called “The Digital Joneses” that I’m doing with Trend Micro and several other parent bloggers, we are presented with themes in the form of challenges each month that we undergo and then write about. July’s theme is about raising people’s awareness about online security, the prevalence of scammers, and phishing campaigns as they all relate to the 2012 Summer Olympics. For me, as I have written about phishing scams in the past, I have taken this awareness challenge to heart personally as it is really a clear and present danger to all of us. In fact, every day I get phishing emails and my wife sometimes calls me to ask about some email that she has gotten that sounded odd in one way or another.

I just got the following email with the subject line: “Information from Comerica Bank customer service team [message id: 0715063392]” from “Comerica Bank” which, for me, was obviously a phishing scam. I wanted to quickly document what I found to alert others.

While the English of this email message is not as bad as other phishing scams that I have seen, it does raise some red flags. However, it is also without any type of formatting (typically, banks have an email template). Also, banks normally don’t send out this type of information email. The email header shows that the sender was “Hotmail” which is a sign of a phishing scam. If you ever get an alert like this, it is better NOT to click the link and instead, go directly to the site by manually typing in the URL.

This is part of the URL that shows up. Note the main domain is: “jfliil.net”!

I just received an email supposedly from “security@logmein.com” claiming that LogMeIn.com is moving to 1024 bit encryption from 128 bit. I am an avid user of LogMeIn and love their service. This seemed a bit odd to me so I decided to investigate this a bit further. As it turns out, it is a Phishing Scam that is now trying to get users to put in their LogMeIn information. (I have covered Phishing scams before. See posts #1, #2 and #3.) This is a very big concern to any LogMeIn users since this essentially gives the scammer access to any accounts in the LogMeIn user’s profile. The good news is, though, that it would be seemingly difficult for the scammer to actually access a computer in said account because you also need to have the security credentials of the computer that is being accessed.

I wanted to be sure that people understand what this phishing scam looks like so that they know to AVOID it. Here are the details:

The Email

I have included the text of the email below in order for Search Engines to pick up the content. Below that is also the image of the email that I received. [click to continue…]

Michael Sheehan

"HighTechDad"

Avid technologist, content marketer, blogger, social media pundit (@HighTechDad on Twitter), writer, loving husband and father of 3 beautiful girls living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I write about technology, consumer electronics, cloud computing, gadgets, software, hardware, parenting "hacks," and other tips & tricks. I'm a fan of all technology that is new, exciting and valuable.

I work at Intel as a Journalist for Intel Free Press and am a Social Media Strategist there as well. All of content on this site is my opinion and not of any employer or company unless otherwise noted. See my About page for more details.